Sparks to Make Flame: On the Ideas behind Fiction

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Once every season, at the end of her hibernation, the contemporary fiction writer (Midlistia microadvanceiata) emerges from her burrow. For years she has lived underground alone, in sweatpants, eating whatever she can scrounge and drinking nothing but the tears of her own crushed ambitions, and as she blinks her way into the light she clutches her newest novel to her breast. The circle of creativity is now complete. It is time for this infant book (made from clay, broken fingernails, coffee grounds, and her own hair) to take its first tentative steps into the world, into the harsh light of publicity. For the lucky ones, this means writers’ festivals.

I love writers’ festivals. I feel privileged to be sitting on stage in the company of my betters, facing that rarest, most perfect of creatures: the reader. If I were a poet, I’d write an ode.

Oh, reader. You, who spend your hard-earned on our books.
You, who not only talk about switching off Twitter to read a novel, but actually do it.
I wish I could marry you. All of you.

This doesn’t mean I find writers’ festival panels easy. Novelists are natural hibernators who can happily sit in front of their screens alone for months and years at a time. (After a few more generations of evolution, we’ll all be hooded-eye albinos with shoulders attached to our earlobes and enormous bladders and stumps for legs, able to touch-type by instinct at birth.) At festivals, these same hermit writers are required to be entertainers: funny and self-deprecating, eloquent and compelling. It shouldn’t be possible to be both introverted and extroverted, yet many writers manage it with grace and wit.

I’m in awe of writers like that. This personality schism doesn’t come naturally to me, but it’s worth the stretch because the thrill of discussing my work with intelligent, engaged readers is one of the joys of my writing life. For a very long time, a novel is a private thing I hold tight and close; it’s seen by nobody else for many months. Then it’s published, and, as if by alchemy, the characters leave my mind and walk around of their own accord and readers meet them, and have opinions and questions about them. It’s magical.

Sometimes, though, the audience questions at writers’ festivals aren’t so joyous. I’ve been asked: “What is your opinion of the elementary school curriculum?” (I have no children, am not a teacher, and have no idea why anyone would ask me that.) Once I was asked: “If someone killed themselves after reading your book, would you feel responsible?” (A dense fog descended on my brain, but I wasn’t forsaken. Other members of the audience yelled at the questioner to sit down and not be such a moron.) But the question that fills my heart with dread and leaves me quaking is this one: “Where do you get your ideas from?”

I know I’m not alone. In green rooms and halls and lecture theaters, writers giggle nervously and roll their eyes when they hear those seven little words. When I’m asked Where do you get your ideas from? first, I look bashful. Then I stutter and stammer. Then I tell the truth, which is I don’t know. If I did know, I’d go there more often and get more and better ones.

After I finished my second novel, I wrote nothing for more than a year. Nada. Zilch. This was the bleakest stretch I could remember. I phoned my husband at work, just to say hi, maybe seven times a day. I cooked elaborate dinners: pot roasts and hot puddings, in contrast to my usual writing fare of ramen and yoghurt. To prove to myself that someone, somewhere, was still finding ideas, I took to visiting bookstores and staring at the new releases section like they were exotic animals in a zoo. Then I called my long-time publisher just to catch up, for a gentle, general chat about my progress, or lack thereof. The conversation went something like this:

Me: OH MY GOD my career is over isn’t it? It’s over. You can tell me. Just tell me straight. I’ll never get another idea. Never never never. Well it was good while it lasted. OH NO this means I’ll have to get a job. Who would be stupid enough to give me a job? My entire skill set revolves around making stuff up. What kind of job is that for a grown up? I’m unemployable. I have a mortgage. I need to eat. My life is over.

Publisher: That’s what you said after your first book. My guess is, you’ll say this after every book.

Me: No no no I’ve never said this before and even if I have this is different I am doomed doomed.

Publisher: Can you speak up? I can hardly hear you.

Me: I’m in a cupboard. I don’t know when I’m coming out.

At the very beginning of my writing life, before I’d finished my first manuscript, before I even knew what I didn’t know, my college teacher invited me to a book launch: a former student of hers had published her debut novel to much international acclaim. I had never been to a book launch before. Other than my teacher, I’d never met a novelist. I was almost 40 and lived in the suburbs. Up until I started writing, I lived a very different kind of life.

The launch was in a groovy pub in Collingwood, in Melbourne’s inner north. It was the kind of place with skateboard parking provided, with a vegan microbrewery attached, where the patrons all looked like amateur secret agents in beards and big glasses. I looked like somebody’s mother.

The author gave a charming and witty speech and, as she sat down to sign books for the long queue, I remember thinking to myself: Well, she’s sorted now. She knows how to do it. She just needs to do it again.

Ho ho ho. I don’t think that way anymore. Now I think that ideas are like fruit, and novelists pick the low-hanging ones first. These are the ones closer to our psyche and our preoccupations, the ones that have been forming inside us for years. The idea for each new novel is harder to find, in my view. Each time, we must stretch further from the heart of us, from the things we care about.

Lately I’ve taken to leaving a notepad on my bedside table in case I dream a novel, like Mary Shelley who, on holiday one summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, woke up one morning with Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. After all, Stephen King wrote Misery after falling asleep on a plane and dreaming about a fan who kidnapped her favorite writer, Stephenie Meyer dreamed up Bella and Edward, and Stevenson snoozed his way to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And it’s working for me. Here is an actual note I found the morning after a particularly vivid dream:

Eight years old again kidnapped by a secret society of maniacal British chefs who know I’m really 45 and want to squeeze my brain to make money on elections, disasters, sports, whatever. I’m in a mini-bus with the chefs. Big white hats. Shoving newspapers in my face. Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal, trying to squeeze my brain in a juicer. Super scary. Run!

I know, right? Those 2016 Booker judges can put away their binoculars: it’ll be my British-chefs-time-travel-brain-juicing-conspiracy novel (The Indigestibles?) by a wide margin.

By now, I’ve established I’m in no position to give advice about finding ideas for novels, but I will anyway.There are two essential things, for me. The first is walking. There is something about this meditative rhythm of movement, about the permission it gives my brain to wander, that encourages tiny idea sparks to make flame. I’ve sold my car and bought a dog. It’s not everything, but it helps.

The second is more difficult. To be a good novelist, you need to keep your sense of curiosity alive. You need to be the kind of person who wants to know things: about people, about events, about objects. What made you want to become a pilot? Do you get on with your sister? What is that police car doing there? Who lives in that tiny/big/smelly house? Who dropped that hand-written note in the park, and what does it say? Good fiction writers are nosey. I think “write what you know” is the single worst piece of writing advice. Instead, write what you’re really interested in. Write what is going to keep you awake at night; write what you don’t understand; write to figure something out. Good novels are journeys into the unknown, for their authors as well as their readers.

Ideas, like much of life, seem obvious in retrospect. The idea behind my most recent novel was a historical photograph. My second novel was inspired by a dinner party conversation with a stranger who was, he told me, “a telecommunications technician by day and a cryptozoologist by night.” For the rest of that evening, we talked about extinct marsupials and giant cats and Bigfoot. He didn’t smile once. For him, it was not a laughing matter. Within a few days, a plot began to appear: a family of con-artists attempt to sting an eccentric millionaire by making him believe an extinct animal still exists.

The idea behind my debut novel is harder to explain. It’s the story of a woman with OCD: a compulsive counter obsessed with 10s who must decide if there is space for love in her regimented world. The book began on a plane, in 2004. I was traveling for business (I worked as a scientific writer then, for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) so my laptop was in the overhead compartment. I was in the aisle seat. It was a 14-hour flight and the movies were terrible. The voice of a counting woman just popped into my head and there was no excuse to not write it down. (Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if I’d had the window seat and hadn’t wanted to disturb a sleeping traveller sitting next to me. Voices are fragile things that fade quickly. A life can turn on moments like these.)

Sometimes, at writers’ festivals and library talks and book clubs, kind people step forward to take extra good care of me. They check what time I want to start my talk; they rearrange the rows of seats; they move the coffee cups to rows of tens. It took me some time to realise, but now I know: they think I am Grace, the counting protagonist. They think I have OCD, which I don’t (they’d realise their mistake if they only saw the state of my study). They think the idea for that book came from within me.

Perhaps it did, though. Perhaps somewhere inside me is a desire for order, a need to be the kind of person who has everything squared away and ship shape. I have no other explanation. And I like it that way. If the act of writing a novel is a mix of art and craft, it seems to me that the “craft” is the only bit I can control. I worry over every sentence, I move commas and rewrite dialogue and try to find a better way to build scene upon scene. The “art” bit is beyond my power. Perhaps I have an old fashioned muse sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear. It’s as good an idea as any.

Toni Jordan
has written three novels. Her debut, the international best-seller Addition, has been published in 17 countries and her most recent, Nine Days, won the 2013 Indie Award for Best Fiction. Toni lives in Melbourne.

Is the writing life as strange as people think? Not at all. I wake pre-light to the piercing cry of the Dawn Bird, a phosphorescent creature whose species I have not yet identified, and witness its meteoric flight toward the eastern horizon. Then I check Twitter while the coffee brews.
The holy water is kept in a crystal vial, hidden inside a hollowed-out copy of The Astral Visions of St. Ignacio the Blind, a 12-century mystic who was found, upon his death, to have grown a third eyeball in the center of his heart. I add a generous splash to my coffee and gulp it hot, and once my hallucinatory seizures have subsided, I perform my ablutions outside at the well of vapors. There I must concentrate my strength against the devilkins -- malignant spirits that emerge from the trees and speak to me with forked, enticing tongues. “Return to sleep,” they say. “No one cares what you write, this day or the next. Eat, be merry, and think no more of your illusory endeavors.”
I weaken their influence with ritual incantations, tug the axe from the gnarled stump, and wait for the morning’s first rays to penetrate the mist. Once the sun has warmed my flesh, I stride into the forest, catching glimpses of my fellow writers -- or do I only imagine their presence in the distance? -- until I find the sacred tree and cut its tenderest branch for use as the day’s scrawling implement.
Back home, I gird myself for the labor ahead. Another cup of coffee, music on the phonograph, and sometimes -- I am ashamed to confess -- a brief nap to settle my nerves and cleanse myself of doubt.
Non-writers often believe “the muse” is a friendly spirit who whispers ideas into warm, receptive minds. This is a charming misconception. The muse is a muscular, nude hermaphrodite with tentacles, wings, and the antlered head of a stag. I start by tearing up the floorboards to reveal the hard-packed earth below, grasp the protruding antlers, and wrest the muse from its subterranean slumber in a violent struggle that lasts one or two hours. After the beast has submitted to my will and I have tended to my wounds, I check a few news sites, play some more music, and begin the work at hand.
What can be said of the experience that follows? Look to the wizards of mountaintop caves, the priestesses of primeval goddesses, infants in the womb, lovers in the grave. Consider the lives of alchemists and orchardists, of masons laying brick and plumbers plumbing pipe. Think upon the tax accountant tallying her columns! The beetle with his dung! The child with her paints! I pace, I sweat, I puzzle over mysteries and harmonies and lies. Throughout the day the devilkins return, slipping through the wattle and daub. The muse impales me with its prongs, seduces me with visions and erotic apparitions, and often -- in the moment when I feel most drunk upon its power -- burrows underground and forces me, again, to drag it into the light.
At close of day, wearied from my trials, I lay the work aside and dwell on my accomplishments. What good have I achieved? What pridefulness or sloth has hindered my success? I know my words, like those of St. Ignacio, will soon be cast into the world to be embraced, rejected, or lost to moldering time, and I fear my bloody tears and deranged, melodic laughter has all been for naught.
But then I focus on my wife, newly returned from her own diurnal struggle. We welcome home our son, with his talon-headed spear, from his daily rites of passage in the labyrinth of his elders. Together we eat and talk, finding comfort in the details of one another’s days, and I remember my vocation is a job like any other, and the work -- like that of a baker, or a sentient termite gnawing symbols into trees -- is only what I make of it. All that remains is feeding the moon cow and nailing shut the doors, and then we all go to bed. I sleep and dream stories.
Image Credit: Flickr/Azel P.

1.My mother has me on a Canadian literature program. Twice a year, birthdays and Christmases, a package arrives from British Columbia with one or two Canadian books in it. I have strong opinions about selecting books for nationalism, but these gifts are wonderful, among the highlights of the year. She sends me novels and poetry that I might not have come across in an American bookstore: Shani Mootoo’s spectacular He Drown She in the Sea, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way The Crow Flies, Patrick Lane’s poetry. The most recent package included Vanishing and Other Stories, by Deborah Willis. I’ve been reading it in the subway to and from work all week. It’s very good.
The title seemed familiar when I first saw it, and then I remembered Vanishing: A Memoir, by Candida Lawrence, which I’ve been meaning to read ever since it came out last year. Which made me think of something I’ve noticed lately: with no disrespect intended to either Willis or Lawrence, an awful lot of books have vanishing in the title. A cursory search on Amazon reveals about a dozen novels and books of poetry called either Disappearing Act or Disappearing Acts, and at least twice that many titled Vanishing Act or some variation thereof—I confess that I stopped counting after the first couple search pages on both counts—and that’s not even counting the scores of books with the word Disappearance in their titles.
Something else I’ve noticed: even when a given book doesn’t have vanishing in the title, it very often has vanishing in the plot. (Full disclosure: I’m guilty of this in two novels.) Once you begin looking for disappearance in the bookstore, turning over jacket flaps and reading plot synopses, it’s everywhere: our literature is full of abducted children, men and woman walking away from their lives, teenagers fading out into heroin cities.
And it isn’t that people don’t disappear in real life. There are haunting posters for an inexplicably absent forty-year-old woman all over my neighborhood today, and Lawrence’s Vanishing is, after all, a memoir. Children set out for bike rides and never come back, men and women step out for the paper and never return. But real-life disappearances are unusual enough that when they happen, they generally make the national news and fill airtime on CNN. People don’t disappear nearly as often in real life, it seems to me, as they do in fiction. I believe that we’re fascinated, as a culture, by the idea of vanishing.
2.
There’s a line that’s stayed with me from Martin Amis’ sensitive yet devastating look at Vladimir Nabokov’s body of work in the Guardian last year. “Writers like to write about the things they like to think about,” he wrote, in an examination of Nabokov’s unsettling insistence upon returning, in novel after novel, to the defilement of twelve-year-old girls.
Writers like to write about the things they like to think about: in the context of a pervasive fascination with disappearance, the most obvious explanation is that writers are, after all, just people, and a fascination with vanishing seems widespread in the general population: there are three apparently separate books entitled How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found on Amazon at the moment, one of them in print for the past thirteen years, and countless variations (How To Be Invisible; Cover Your Tracks Without Changing Your Identity; Hide Your Assets And Disappear.)
I doubt there’s anyone among us who hasn’t at least once, at least fleetingly, fantasized about stepping out of our lives. In darker moments, it’s a tantalizing thought: the opportunity to start over, a new name, past mistakes erased. “After reading this book,” an anonymous Amazon customer wrote on one of the How To Disappear Completely review pages, “I spent hours at the public library copying obituaries of baby boys who were born and died around my birthday. I wanted to prepare myself to assume another identity one day. It was a delicious obsession, and exhilarating.”
3.I would be interested to know how many of the readers of the disappearance how-to guides have actually disappeared, and how many, like the anonymous man copying obituaries in the library, buy the books in order to make the fantasy of disappearance more tangible. Not just a dream but a real possibility, now that you have a guide to the territory. We live in a strangely paradoxical time: on the one hand, there has never been a period in human history when we’ve been documented so relentlessly as we are now, so fingerprinted and photographed and bar-coded and taped. On the other hand, our identities seem somehow malleable. This is an era where a complete re-creation of self seems possible.
In Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply—one of the great disappearance novels, in my opinion—a recent high school graduate who’s assumed a new identity begins to wonder who she is. She has no parents; she’s left her older sister and her dreary hometown and set off into a frightening new life. Her name was once Lucy Lattimore, but that’s not the name on her passport. “More and more,” Chaon writes,
she was aware that Lucy Lattimore had left the earth. Already there was hardly anything left of her—a few scraps of documents, birth certificate and social security card in her mother’s drawer back in the old house, her high school transcripts resident on some outdated computer, the memories of her sister Patricia, the vague recollections of her classmates and teachers, already fading.
The truth was, she had killed herself months ago. Now she was next to nothing: a nameless physical form that could be exchanged and exchanged and exchanged until nothing remained but molecules.
When I needed a copy of my birth certificate in order to claim American citizenship at the Montreal consulate, I ordered it online from a government website. I needed nothing but a credit card for the processing fee; the document arrived in the mail a few weeks later. It occurred to me later that I could have ordered anybody’s birth certificate, absolutely anybody’s, and that anyone else could have ordered mine.
4.
If writers like to write about the things we like to think about, and if we spend—as the plot synopses on our dust jackets suggest—an inordinate amount of time thinking about vanishing, another possibility we might consider is that the very act of writing fiction is in itself a kind of disappearance. And if you’re engaged in disappearance as a profession, doesn’t it make sense that it might become your theme?
We were raised on stories of brave children entering magical countries. Alice falls down a rabbit hole and steps through the looking glass, Max flees to an island populated by Wild Things, other children slip through the backs of wardrobes and through gaps in hedges and leave this world behind. Sitting down at a desk and slipping into a kingdom where the plot, the characters, the narrative arc, even the laws of physics are malleable and within your control is not, perhaps, terribly different. When you sit down to write a novel you step out of your life for a little while; it’s a separate world you’re creating on the page, wholly apart from the chaos and the disappointments of life on earth.

1.I’m just not a short-story writer, a few fiction writers have said to me recently, young authors who’ve written one or two novels. I’m struck by the statement, because I wonder often about this – the difference between long form and short form, process-wise – and have been tempted to make the declaration (to myself, at least) as well. At this point, I empathize with the statement, but am not quite ready to go there.
I wrote short stories earlier in my writing life because, well, that’s what They told us to do. And They were right. You do need to work on several stories, soup to nuts, to hone craft and process, narrative structure, revision skills; to experiment with voice, point-of-view, subject matter. Of course you can practice and develop all these by writing a novel; but it will take you much much longer. Consider how many story drafts get partially or completely tossed into the literal and/or virtual garbage as you figure out what you are really writing about; how many novels do you want to write and trash as part of your learning process before your stamina gives way to defeat? Practice works best on a manageable scale.
But I never felt like I hit my stride with short stories. I published several, and even won some awards, but of all the stories I’ve written, I’m probably proud of one, maybe two of them. One story, which won a fairly prestigious award, was so bad in my opinion, that I completely destroyed it – hard copy and digital. (I recently contacted the publication that sponsored the award, and they too have no record of it; poof! – I am not a short-story writer.)
When I happened upon the novel that would become Long for This World, it was liberating and exhilarating. All that room, the freedom to move among settings, cultures, time periods, points of view. The license to spend three or four years working on something, keeping notebooks full of ideas and sketches and scenes, filtering anything and everything through the lens of The Novel I’m Working On; indulging my mind and imagination in layers of world and character and idea. This is my medium, I started to think; this is how I experience life – big and messy – what existence means to me. I am a kitchen-sink writer: throw it all in, everything you care about in one, interconnected world, glorious heterogeneity; then shape something out of it.
But look: I’ve written one novel (and a second monster of a novel draft), and I’m not even 40 yet. Is it really time to decide what kind of writer I am? Developing as a writer is indeed so much about knowing thyself; about riding the tailwinds of your strengths, not spinning your wheels trying to be a different kind of writer than what you are. David Means said recently in a New Yorker podcast, referring to Raymond Carver, “Style is a maneuver around what you can’t do […] around things you can’t deal with.” Barry Hannah said, “Be master of such as you have.”
On the other hand, the sculptor Henry Moore said that contentment is having an impossible goal, the absorbedness (Donald Hall’s word) of pursuing it. To me, the short story is this miraculously compressed form, elegant and complex, small in shape but large and deep in meaning; it has the capacity for perfection in a way that the novel does not. Many writers work their way “up” to writing a novel; perhaps my artistic trajectory will be to work my way “down” to writing gorgeous, perfect short stories. Who knows? I look forward to finding out.
2.
In the meantime, I am lately obsessed with the form we refer to as “linked” stories. Sometimes these are called “story cycles” or “a collection of tales about _____.” As a reader and developing writer, I cannot get enough of this form: compression and vast heterogeneity in one! The stories in this sort of collection may vary widely in style, voice, point-of-view, scope. Often they are held together by a single character, or perhaps a place/culture; or both.
The “link” can be strong or weak, explicit or implicit. From where this writer sits – aesthetically, developmentally – the linked collection is a potential new “home” for development of craft. If 20 pages never quite feels like enough; if you and your world /your character have more business to tend to at the end of this particular narrative arc; or if that minor character got cut from a story but is still breathing and pulsing and waiting to go on stage; well then off you go to the next story in the “cycle.” At the same time, you can work within the framework of compression, of small moments, of elegant lines and movement; you can write and sustain a standalone piece that is driven solely by the energy of voice; you can work at mastering the power of simplicity without sacrificing prismatic complexity. Ah, the joy, the absorbedness, of the impossible goal.
3.
Some of my favorite linked collections:
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson – short “tales” of life in the fictional Midwestern town of Winesburg. We get to know many different characters, and all the stories reveal the essential (and ironic) loneliness of living in a place where everybody knows your name. Haunting, romantic, a masterpiece of the achingly grotesque inner lives of human beings.
Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber – both form and content are stunning in this National Book Award finalist. The collection is subtitled “A Ring of Stories,” and indeed they are meant to be read in sequence; a minor mention or character in one story becomes the heart of the next (and we start and end with a contemporary character named Alice). In between we traverse centuries and continents, along with the timeless experiences of faith and passion, each story novelistic in scope. Picasso said that a great work of art comes together “just barely,” and there is that delicate, not-quite-taut sense of wholeness in Silber’s work.
Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx – Proulx’s Wyoming is a brutal and unforgiving place, but not one that we can’t all on some level relate to: you may not be a rodeo bull-rider, but you probably know what it is to feel wounded and constrained by your parents’ flaws; you may not be a gay cowboy, but you may know the pain and dangers of hiding (and revealing) your deepest passions in a hostile environment. I particularly love the diversity of form within the collection; stories range from two to 40 pages long, from sharply humorous flash fictions to vast, novelistic canvasses.
Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant – like many devotees of Gallant, I don't know what took me so long to get to her. Her stories I suppose are difficult, in the sense that the prose is dense, intelligent, original. This is not “summer reading.” The series of five Linnet Muir stories are the ones I’ve enjoyed most and exemplify exactly what I love about linked stories; each story stands alone, but together they sing. I recommend them for anyone who is weary of mopey-smart-girl stories but wants to be inspired by excellent mopey-smart-girl stories.
Stories by Leonard Michaels -- I love the stories about a character named (Phillip) Leibowitz, as both a youth and an adult, including “Murderers,” “City Boy,” “Getting Lucky,” and “Reflections of a Wild Kid.” The character may not be exactly the same character in all the stories, but again that’s the beauty of the form; maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. Michaels didn’t assemble these stories to form a collection, he used the linked form more liberally. Before he died in 2008, Michaels was also working on a series of stories about a mathematician named Nachmann.
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson -- the nameless through-line narrator of these stories is an excellent study in compelling unlikeability. He sees the world so vividly, and ecstatically; though only when he’s high or experiencing some kind of violence or brutality. The reader lives in that uncomfortable tension throughout, and enjoys it. By the final story, our anti-hero settles down a bit, though (we find ourselves hoping) not too much.
Fidelity by Wendell Berry – in these five stories, Berry revisits the world of Port William, Kentucky, the territory for all his fiction, and even some of our favorite characters like Andy Catlett, Berry’s presumed fictional persona. Berry’s fiction is both warm and harsh, in the way that perhaps only a farmer-poet-essayist-fictionwriter-activist can be.
Stories by Anton Chekhov – Chekhov’s stories are not linked, per se, but as I wrote in a previous essay here at The Millions on the good doctor, there is something to be said for reading them in groups, in succession – as if together they make up his Great Novel, his population of characters all really aspects of One Universal Character. To my mind, the stories are linked by Chekhov’s acute vision of humanity – as flabby and flawed, yet earnestly suspended in perpetual longing. As readers, we recognize that longing, its tragedy and vitality.
Lastly, it’s been many years since I’ve read either of these, but The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro and Dubliners by James Joyce are two widely acclaimed and beloved linked-story collections that are worth mentioning here. John Gardner wrote about the former, which revolves around two characters, Flo and her stepdaughter Rose: "Whether [it] is a collection of stories or a new kind of novel I'm not quite sure, but whatever it is, it's wonderful.” The latter, of course, is Joyce’s searing portrait of his home city in the early 20th century, captured in 15 stories, one of which, “The Dead,” is considered by some the greatest short story ever written.
4.
Art is long, as they say. Writing well, in any form or genre, is a marathon, not a sprint. Far in the distance, many training miles ahead, I see that perfect gem of a story, those immortal 5,000 words that will leave the hundreds of thousands of others I’ve scribbled and typed, maybe even published, in the dust.
(Image: Chains - rusted from knottyboywayne's photostream)

8 comments:

Funny and true. The question that most makes my mind freeze is “what are you reading now?” or “have you read anything good lately?” Yes and yes, but ask me and I will go blank. My experience with ideas and productivity works more this way– blocked by so many ideas, so many choices, and not enough time. But that is an easier problem to live with than those periods when ideas have fled or seem far too based on personal experience and/or neurosis.

Yes, walking. Especially after a session at the desk. I NEED it all to digest somewhere inside me, maybe my brain.Of course the idea is only a beginning. Then comes the challenge of making the idea real: “Between the conception and the creation… falls a shadow..” (T.S. Eliot)

“It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see,” and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.” Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

“Eight years old again kidnapped by a secret society of maniacal British chefs who know I’m really 45 and want to squeeze my brain to make money on elections, disasters, sports, whatever. I’m in a mini-bus with the chefs. Big white hats. Shoving newspapers in my face. Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal, trying to squeeze my brain in a juicer. Super scary. Run!”

This is the voice that sounds the depth of one’s soul. Writers do feel refreshed by each casual glance at the debris, the dangling shoestring and disorderly kitchen. They record whatever seems to be insignificant but can be so revealing of the inner logic of the owner. Be careful of these writers as always.

The debate between writers and critics over authorial intent is literally a life and death struggle. By literally, I mean figuratively. On the one hand, you have critics who have trumpeted “the death of the author” for several decades now, the view that holds that authors can’t be the true masters of their creations, can’t fully grasp the implications of language they pluck, seemingly, from a great assembly line of words and idioms. On the other hand, you have writers like those anthologized in The Story About the Story and The Story About the Story II, who argue, more often than not, that to read is to feel your mind, however fleetingly and incompletely, jacked into the mind of another, a connection that is perhaps more alive than even our relations with those we consider intimates.
The debate is preposterous on its surface. Of course the publishing industry, with its book packaging scandals and its ridiculous pseudonym play (I once met a man, an ex-convict, who claimed to have profited three-quarters of a million dollars ghostwriting a series of Little House books for a descendant of Laura Ingalls Wilder), undermines the sense that reading is interaction with another discrete life. But anomalies don’t founder what is intuitively true. When I read, I read for what I think an author wants to be expressing. In this, I’m not alone. Many years ago, Henry James complained – a plaintive cry, really – that critics of his own time were “apt to stand off from the [artist’s] intended sense of things.”
Where does this impulse come from? There are many sources, of course: the new critics and the intentional fallacy, and T.S. Eliot would probably be in this camp, and maybe the surrealists, and perhaps someone like Mallarmé. I don’t claim to be a scholar of all that, and anyway “the death of the author” traces most directly back to Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” a short piece that, pound for pound, may be one of the most influential texts ever produced.
And what did Barthes intend? That’s not entirely clear. “The Death of the Author” begins with a quote from Balzac’s story “Sarrasine,” a musing passage that Barthes reads as neither a character’s free indirect speech, nor the author “acting directly on reality.” From this he declares both the death of the author and the “birth of the reader”: an active interpreter of writers who are no longer authors at all, in the old sense of the word. Proust is Barthes’s best example of this new writer, the “scriptor” whose character is a depiction “of he who is going to write.” This “enunciation is an empty process,” and scriptors merely supply a “tissue of quotations.” “I is nothing other than the instance of saying I,” Barthes writes. It’s only in the mind of the new reader that words and images come to mean anything at all.
The old position of the author, Barthes claims, mistakenly demanded that we think of books as written in code. Hear, hear. Other than that, all Barthes really seems to mean is that reading has become a cooperation of imaginations. What he doesn’t recognize – couldn’t have recognized – is that the same electric jolt that he had used to execute the author would shock to life a correspondingly monstrous critic.
To back up a bit. What’s meant by the “literary canon”? Literally, a canon is any authoritative set of standards, but figuratively the literary canon most closely resembles the processes of Biblical canonization, by which Christian sects debated and decided which ancient scriptures were of divine origin, inspired. In other words, a bunch of folks got together to look at work they knew was written by a person, and they simply decided that whoever wrote it no longer mattered, because God wrote it. Those writers might as well be dead – and that’s sort of what became of Barthes’s essay. Literature is a secular revelation of a more earthly god, human consciousness, and all that was needed was a critic/theologian to interpret it for laypeople, for mere “readers” who would be less encouraged to read for themselves than compelled to listen to interpretations. That pretty much describes both the modern Ph.D. in English and the practice of teaching literature to children as a compulsory subject in the public education system.
But the demotion of writers to figures stumbling blindly through the collective unconscious falls to the same arguments that toppled B.F. Skinner’s, and behaviorism’s, simplistic claim that consciousness doesn’t exist (See Chomsky, Koestler, Carl Rogers, and others). More simply, Samuel Butler once refuted this same species of skepticism – the claim that matter itself was hypothetical – by pounding his foot on a stone and proclaiming “I refute it thus!” To the literary obstetrician Barthes attempting to midwife a new reader, one might feel compelled to proclaim, “It has always been thus!”
Because he wasn’t saying anything new. And I don’t mean new critics or Mallarmé For at least a couple hundred years, writers have understood that their work wouldn’t amount to much without the reader’s imagination percolating away on the other side of the page. It was there in 1837, in “The American Scholar,” when Emerson coined the phrase “creative reading” in the same sentence that gave us “creative writing.” It was there six decades later, when Henry James described The Turn of the Screw as a “process of adumbration,” a sketch the reader colors in with “his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy.” And it was there a couple decades after that, in Barthes’s beloved Proust’s “On Reading”:
And there, indeed, is one of the great and marvelous characters of beautiful books (and one which will make us understand the role, at once essential and limited, that reading can play in our spiritual life) which for the author could be called “Conclusions” and for the reader “Incitements.” We feel quite truly that our wisdom begins where that of the author ends, and we would like to have him give us answers, while all he can do is give us desires. And these desires he can arouse in us only by making us contemplate the supreme beauty which the last effort of his art has permitted him to reach. But by a singular and, moreover, providential law of mental optics (a law which perhaps signifies that we can receive the truth from nobody, and that we must create it ourselves), that which is the end of their wisdom appears to us as but the beginning of ours, so that it is at the moment they have told us all they could tell us, that they create in us the feeling that they have told us nothing yet.
To be fair, Barthes had his regrets. Ten years after “The Death of the Author,” and shortly before he died, he kicked back at his own, “I is nothing other than the instance of saying I.” In its first pages, A Lover’s Discourse insists that “To that discourse has been restored its fundamental person, the I.”
So how does the struggle end? Perhaps with simple statements, rather than melodramatic metaphors. Critics who have taken up the dead author standard would have us regard creative work as an elaborate Freudian slip: don’t read for what a writer is trying to say, read for what they’ve said in spite of themselves. That’s wrong. Literature (and all the arts, really) is the product of concentrated, intelligent minds to which we are granted intimate, but temporary and incomplete, access. We should embrace and not denounce that opportunity to comingle thought. Art is not an accident.